Welcome to the Power of Connections course blog. This is where we are posting Power of Connections course content for the open Web, and also where we'll create our open catalog of ideas and activities for student engagement. The facilitators for this learning experience will also use this site to share personal reflections on learning design and student engagement. When referencing the course or this blog, please use the #NTPoC hashtag.

Monday, August 10, 2015

Welcome to Unit 5 of the Power of Connections. This is the final unit of content in our learning experience, and our focus is on The Power of Imagination. Our goal is to discuss ways that we might re-imagine our institutions through the lens of student engagement.

Rob: I’m looking for a rubber duck. Stacy: Excuse me? Rob: A rubber duck. Stacy: I’m not having trouble with your pronunciation, Rob. I’m just not sure what you’re talking about. Rob: Have you ever heard of "rubber duck debugging?" Stacy: No. Rob: It’s a term people use sometimes in software programming. It comes from a story about a guy would carry around this rubber duck and debug code by forcing himself to explain it, line-by-line, to the duck.

Stacy: Are you trying to be "meta" with this? Rob: What do you mean? Stacy: Think about it. We’re having a dialogue about a guy having a dialogue with a duck. A dialogue within a dialogue, with a duck thrown in for good measure. Rob: Ahhh… got it. We’re using a dialogue to improve our presentation of information and, as an example, we’re describing a story about a guy who has a dialogue with a duck to debug code. Stacy: To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure I would have used a duck if I wanted to talk things through with another person. Rob: Not a good enough listener? Stacy: No, I’m pretty sure the duck would be a fine listener. I’m just thinking of Animal Farm. I’d probably feel more comfortable with a pig. Rob: Hmmm... I shouldn’t be taking this personally, should I? Stacy: You should be so lucky. Rob: Very funny. If I were choosing a new partner for dialogue, I’d probably go with… well… you know, I guess it actually depends on what I’d be talking about. Stacy: Agreed. I wouldn’t want to dialogue about cooking with my pig, for example. Rob: I would think not. Let me think for a second. Hmmm...Okay, I definitely know who I would want to dialogue with if I were trying to talk about teaching ideas or reimagining the design of the university. Stacy: I bet I know. Kerry Magruder, right? Rob: I guess that was pretty easy. In my mind, it would go something like this.

Stacy: Yes, Kerry would be fun. But this brings up a really good point. So many times, when we’re trying out new ideas or trying to make changes, we don’t have that perfect person to dialogue with. Rob: That’s right. That’s why I think we have to "imagine" them. Stacy: Like "rubber duck re-designing?" Rob: Exactly. We need to find someone or something, living or inanimate that we can talk to, share our fears with. Stacy: Seriously, I like this idea. It always helps to have a conversation, to talk things through. I’ve given class assignments where students have to create their own HTML, for example. One technique I recommend when they have issues is to read each word/line aloud - you can often find little errors that way.Rob: Going back to the rubber duck debugging example, it can be also really helpful to describe what you think something is going to do (what it’s supposed to do or what you want it to do), and then observe what it actually does. The gap between the two provides important understanding. Stacy: Of course. Teaching something forces us to see it from different perspectives. Rob: And, talking out loud about our ideas and worries inevitably reduces our anxiety. Stacy: Okay, so you’ve mentioned Kerry Magruder as a real person you would like to share ideas with. What about other types of characters for your dialogues? Rob: Great question. I might go with a western hero. Maybe Butch Cassidy or Rooster Cogburn. Stacy: Interesting. Very interesting. I was thinking more along the lines of Spock and Data.

Questions

What solutions have you used in the past for "talking through" your ideas and/or concerns when there was no one physically available for you to talk to?

What characters or objects would you choose to share your ideas with?

Think about the advantages and disadvantages to talking to an inanimate object or a character that is not really "there?"

This week’s improv comes in two variations. Feel free to complete only one version of the improv or both.

Variation 1

The eight images below represent possible learning spaces for a re-imagined learning environment. You have been appointed as the Chief Learning Designer for your institution and may select any three of these spaces in order to create the ideal learning space. You may combine them in any order. Post your selection in a blog post or comment, along with your reasoning.

Space #1

Space #2

Space #3

Space #4

Space #5

Space #6

Space #7

Space #8

Variation 2

You have been appointed as the Chief Learning Designer for your institution and have inherited the learning spaces pictured above as part of the institution’s initiative to build the ideal environment for learning in the 21st Century. You have also been given enough budget to add one more learning space to complete the initiative. Find or take a picture of the "last learning space" and post it in a Twitter post with the #NTPoC hashtag and "The Last Space" reference.

Hopefully, our "Trading Spaces" improv has helped stimulate some creative thinking regarding how we think about our institutions as well as how we might re-imagine them. This is also a new improv variation to consider when creating student-creation prompts for students.

As we did in Unit 4, I would now like us to think about how this completion improv might be modified and/or reused in different disciplines, courses, or situations.

For example, this improv makes uses of a set collection of images as a foundation, and then asks participants to complete designs using those images. What value do you see, for example in having students contribute the initial set of images?

What are some other possible applications you see? What modifications would you make to the current improv model that might make it more effective? More fun and engaging? Are there similar improvs or completion activities you have used or participated in previously? If so, what did you like about them?

Please share your thoughts in the comments below. Also, feel free to link to any Web resources, personal blog posts, or other social media sites that you want to share with the community.

Naturally, these types of activities fall into a number of different categories. Key differentiators include:

Does the activity require creation of content or creation + analysis?

Do participants need to learn or use an unfamiliar tool for the activity?

Does the activity require mastery of a new learning concept?

How much time does the activity require for completion?

Is the activity complex or simple?

For those new to creating artifact challenges, or those simply looking for a broad range of easy-to-adapt improvs, I really like the Daily Try activity that Alan Levine is facilitating as part of the UdG Agora project. The great thing about the Daily Try is that, while many of the activities are fairly simple, they generally lead to genuine reflection. Another great aspect of the Daily Try is that all of the participant work is aggregated via Twitter tags, which reinforces community sharing.

Here are a couple of examples of Daily Try activities that I have completed.

For this Artifact Challenge we would like for you to design your own Daily Try. Your contribution should consist of two parts: 1) a description; 2) an example. You can look at any of the #agoratry examples to get ideas for how to do this. Please note that these can be either simple or complex, and can veer more toward a specific discipline.

You can create your Daily Try as a blog post and provide a link inside a #NTPoC tweet or as part of a comment below.

Join us for a live #NTPoC Twitter chat on Thursday, August 13th at 10:00 AM CDT. To tune in, simply follow the #NTPoC hashtag activity from 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM (CDT), and add your own tweets to the conversation.

Our Twitter chats for the course are limited to an hour in length, and we use the following format to help make our collaborative conversations cohesive (or at least less chaotic!).

We will use 6 different questions as prompts for our chat/discussion. We will start with Q1 and then, after 10 minutes have passed, we will move on to Q2 and then keep repeating that pattern until we have covered all 6 questions.

The questions are listed here (so you can think about them in advance), but they will also be posted as tweets (e.g. "Q1- What does good student engagement look like to you?").

When you participate, put A1, A2 etc. at the beginning of your tweets. This will make it easier for people to know what questions you’re addressing.

Friday, August 7, 2015

It's been another fun week of looking at student engagement. As part of that activity, I thought I would share a couple of examples that have been created this week. The first two are from Laura Gibbs and are nice reflections of her experience in designing activities for student creation.

Finally, as we start gearing up for next week and our discussions on "The Power of Imagination," I want to let everyone know that we are going to have another Twitter Chat. So, if you can, get it on your schedule now. We'll be chatting on Thursday, August 13 at 10:00 AM CDT. I'll be tweeting more information about this beginning Sunday.

Wednesday, August 5, 2015

G’day everyone! I think everyone will enjoy this week’s (Unit 4) completion improv but, more important, I believe it is the type of framework for which you will see many possible applications. As you’ll likely see, there are so many ways we can create incomplete problems or structures that can help participants work out their personal understanding or ownership of information.

And speaking of working things out, I wanted to share a new post I’ve written that discusses a modeling framework for doing collaborative design work on courses (for any environment). This is a visual approach to learning design that supports the nuances of connected or engaged learning models, and that may be helpful to those who don’t already have their own language or processes developed for this work. I see this as being particularly useful when it comes to helping others translate their learning vision into online or hybrid environments.

So much important stuff here in +Adeline Koh 's
essay; I would ask same question about online: why is all our online
training for faculty conducted face to face...? If faculty haven't
learned how to learn online, then how on earth can they teach online
effectively...?

Why is it that although as educators we largely understand that there
are valid criticisms of the lecture format, that we continue to
reproduce that format whenever we meet professionally? Think about how
every conference you go to has one keynote or more, or about the
countless number of times you’ve listened to academic papers read out
loud — sometimes without the speaker even looking up. Why is it that we
teach our students in one way and teach each other differently?

Tuesday, August 4, 2015

This week is all about student creation as a way to facilitate student engagement. In the Dialogues section, Stacy and Adam provide valuable insight into why student creation is important (as well as how to design for this kind of activity), and our improv this week focuses on completion exercises. Completion improvs are particularly useful because they offer a low-risk way to get students to participate and have fun with creation. They are also great for encouraging collaboration and networking.

Monday, August 3, 2015

Alan Levine has created a great online activity as part of his involvement with the UDG Agora project out of Guadalajara.

His site, The Daily Try, is a SPLOT, and presents a fun completion improv every single day. Even better, he uses a Twitter hashtag for each improv and aggregates the responses on his site. It's creative and it's collaborative. What's not to like?

Alan's on Daily Try #66 at the moment, but I thought it would be fun to share a few of the prompts that I enjoyed.1. #agoratry5: Share Something Interesting from Openculture.com -- I shared a series of lectures by one of my favorite authors, Jorge Luis Borges.

2.#agoratry14: Explain your profession to your mom. Make it fit in a tweet. Good luck -- The kicker here is the part about explaining it so your mom will understand. My answer was, "I tell stories about teaching to help people teach more effectively."

Happy Monday, everyone, and welcome to Week 4 of our Power of Connections learning experience. This week, our focus is on student creation. We'll be looking at how we can foster student ownership of the learning process, and how we can facilitate student engagement through creation activities.

A great place to start in this Unit 4 topic is with our dialogues on Fostering Creativity Through Student Ownership. This includes video interviews with Stacy and with Adam Croom, the Director of Digital Learning at the University of Oklahoma. They both share great experiences related to student creation and its importance in promoting learning that engages.

Also, you may want to take a look at the script and slides form my key note presentation last week at the Big XII Teaching and Learning Conference. My topic was "student engagement," and the presentation should serve as a good recap of the different ideas we have been sharing in this community.

A few years back, the founders of Holstee came together and penned how they wanted to define success. This included broad life statements like "When you eat, appreciate every last bite," "Getting lost with help you find yourself," and "Do what you love and do it often." In 2009, the teamed up with designer Rachael Beresh, to transform their thoughts into what would become a famous letterpress poster, called Holstee’s Manifesto.

Since then, this poster has been mimicked hundreds of times and, chances are, you’ll find some variation of the idea in your local home decor store. Side note: the idea of the manifesto has been playfully mocked. There’s a slew of generators that incoherently pull together strings of rhetoric.

For this artifact challenge, construct the Creativity Manifesto for your classroom. If you wish to design it online, you can use an web-based editing tool such as Canva. If you want to be a little more simplistic, take advantage of a rich text editor that allows you to change font size and styling or simply draw it out on a whiteboard and snap a photo. Consider the following when completing the project:

1. How have the constraints of the medium that you have chosen to design with affected your end product? For instance, if you used a whiteboard and only had one color, you might have found yourself making different statements big and bold. If you had multiple colors, the size may have not mattered at all to you.

2. What are some of the broader life principles students take away from what you teach? To what degree have you integrated your own life lessons into the learning experience?

3. Are the ideas that you have identified with your manifesto juxtaposed with traditional learning objectives?

4. Please share your Creativity Manifesto test and/or image in a comment, or provide a link if you’ve created your manifesto on a blog or other external site.

The sample "completion" improvs for this unit are designed to demonstrate the creativity and versatility inherent in this particular improv model. These improvs are incredible flexible and work particularly well as group activities.

As we did in Unit 3, I would now like us to think about now is how our completion improv examples might be modified for reuse in different disciplines, courses, or situations.

For example, instead of having a text with missing words, we could easily offer a design with specific elements removed/hidden, or a code sample that is missing a number of functions (where multiple function solutions could be used, but with different results). The idea is to allow participants the opportunity to complete the construct in a creative manner without worrying that they might be suggesting a "wrong" solution.

What are some other possible applications you see? What modifications would you make to the current improv model that might make it more effective? More fun and engaging? Are there similar improvs or completion activities you have used or participated in previously? If so, what did you like about them?

Please share your thoughts in the comments below. Also, feel free to link to any Web resources, personal blog posts, or other social media sites that you want to share with the community.

In Unit 3, we talked about "addition" improvs, which focus on expansion as opposed to constraint. A particularly useful model for "addition" improvs is one in which the user fills in gaps or missing components. Such completion improvs tend to be really effective for collaboration and personalization because:

They are fun and simple, and a good way to get participants excited about improvs in general.

They are "open" and yet have clear structures.

They are extremely low-risk in terms of getting a "wrong" answer.

They tend to work well in group and individual activities.

They adapt easily to any discipline.

A common completion improv can be found in the many cartoon caption contests run by magazines (The New Yorker still does this – scroll down to see the current caption contest). I have a number of variations I like to use in my courses and presentations. One of them involves showing a video clip but erasing the audio before the "punchline" is delivered. I then ask participants to fill in the missing punchline or dialogue to complete the video.

Here is an example of this type of completion activity. Listen to the first part of the video clip and then imagine what the two people might be saying once the audio disappears. When you’ve got something that works for you, post it in a comment.

Another of my favorite completion improvs involves presenting participants with a text that is missing some of its words. The participants are asked to fill in the blanks with the words or phrases they think are the most relevant.

This activity can be done with any kind of text or string (I’ve used advertisements, short stories, e-mail, technical descriptions, and HTML code). In the example below, I use a poem by Lisel Mueller, and ask participants to fill in the blanks with the words that make the most sense to them. Feel free to try your hand and post your suggested words as a comment.Imaginary Paintings

HOW I WOULD PAINT THE FUTURE

A strip of horizon and a _________________, seen from the back, forever _________________.

HOW I WOULD PAINT NOSTALGIA

An old-fashioned painting, a genre piece. People in bright and dark _________________. A radiant bride in _________________ standing above a _________________, watching the water rush away, away, away.

Lisel Mueller. Alive Together: New and Selected Poems, Louisiana State University Press, 1996.

I recently sat down with Adam Croom, the Director of Digital Learning at the University of Oklahoma, to discuss student creation, its benefits in learning, and how we can encourage faculty to incorporate student creation into their courses. In the course of our conversation, Adam spoke several times about the importance of personal taste and how it should be factored in to our thinking about student creation in our courses.

Questions

1. How do you grade creative assignments? Can you think of techniques used in creative disciplines, such as writing, studio arts, and architecture, that can be adapted to other disciplines?

2. Do you have activities/assignments in your courses that are not graded? Do the students complete these assignments even though there is no grade associated with them? How do you assign credit and get the students to fully engage if there is no grade?

3. How can we encourage students to bring their outside interests/hobbies and non-related skills into a course?

I recorded interviews with Stacy and Adam Croom this week (Adam is the Director of Digital Learning at the University of Oklahoma), and the biggest theme that emerged was student ownership – getting students to take greater ownership of their learning. I asked both of them how they facilitate student ownership in their teaching, as well as the benefits of student creation in general. Stacy Zemke – Helping Students Take Ownership

In my conversation with Stacy, she talks about the different ways she designs her courses to facilitate student ownership. Her ideas include: 1) having students participate in the construction of the course syllabus; 2) allowing students to define their discussion assignments; 3) Asking students to post content to Wikipedia.

Adam Croom – Involving Students in the Creative Process

Adam is a big fan of encouraging student creativity and getting them to be participants in the process of invention. In the video below, he talks about the challenges and rewards associated with getting students to construct new forms of knowledge.

Questions

1. As I think about these conversations, several questions spring to mind. Feel free to chime in with answers, or to add your own questions to this list by posting a comment.

2. How can you balance the need to teach the content that is "required" for a course while, at the same time, giving students the freedom to design/create their own experience?

3. What are some ways you’ve added creative activities to your teaching? What worked well, and what would you change?

4. How can we adapt creative processes from specific disciplines (for example project critique from Fine Arts, or discovery based science labs) and integrate them into the courses of other disciplines?

"This is a display of my Inoreader feed
for #NTPoC. It combines items from people blogging for NTPoC along with
Google+ and Twitter hashtag searches for the Power of Connections
course. This same content is also available as an RSS feed.

And please use the hashtag #NTPoC to share and connect at Twitter or at Google+! You can see an #NTPoC hashtag Twitter widget at the Power of Connections blog. For more, see Laura's homepage at MythFolklore.net."

I also want to say a big THANKS to everyone participating in the course so far. I'm presenting the keynote at the Big XII Teaching and Learning Conference today and am sharing many ideas and examples from our collaboration together.

Finally, if you haven't yet checked out Laura's #growthmindset memes blog, I highly recommend it! It's a collection of "growth mindset memes" to help promote Carol Dweck's model of the growth mindset in fun and memorable ways.

"Improvisations are also extremely useful as a way to promote collaboration. By definition, they are "open" -- they have no right answer. This means they tend to be student-friendly and also make for great group activities. When there's no "right" answer, students spend less time trying to promote their own personal perspectives."

Our Unit 3 improvisation has us look specifically at "addition" improvs and provides a model for exploring openness and collaboration even further. Check it out and, while you're at it, add a line or to to the "Exquisite Corpse" story I have started.

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

By now, everyone knows that I am a huge fan of using improvisations as a way to model student creation and ownership. They are also useful from a teaching perspective because they are generally abstractions, that is they adapt easily to different learning environments, pedagogical preferences, and disciplines.

But improvisations are also extremely useful as a way to promote collaboration. By definition, they are "open" -- they have no right answer. This means they tend to be student-friendly and also make for great group activities. When there's no "right" answer, students spend less time trying to promote their own personal perspectives.

This line of thinking is one of my primary topics for my Thursday keynote address at the Big XII Teaching and Learning Conference. In particular, as part of that presentation, I'll be sharing a number of video clips to illustrate the value of "constraints" and "addition" when it comes to improvs and promoting student engagement.

One of the video clips I'll be showing and talking about comes from the 1995 movie Apollo 13. It is a great example of how problems without "known" or "right" answers -- situations framed by openness -- really lend themselves well to collaboration. The clip below is one of my examples. In this scene, NASA engineers are faced with the proverbial problem of having to make a square peg fit in a round hole. Goo luck with that, right?

This type of problem certainly invites collaboration and team problem solving. It also sends me back to the drawing board over and over again to design improv models that present similar variables and create the same type of collaboration in courses.

Everyone really seems to be getting into the spirit of the course now.
That means you can come along when you have time, work at your own pace,
and jump into the activities, readings, and discussions that interest
you. Here are a couple of things to consider today.

2. If you're looking for something really quick to do today, go to Unit 3 and "The Power of Addition." This has an example of the "Exquisite Corpse" improv and I have already started to a story in the comments section. Join us by adding your lines to our story.

3. Over on the formal course site (https://connect.nextthought.com), there are a number of conversations going on as well. In particular, I love the new posts going up on the "Framing Connections" activity from Unit
2. Cody Taylor's fantastic history of his
personal computing is definitely worth checking out.

Monday, July 27, 2015

Welcome to Week 3 of Power of Connections. We’ve opened up the content for Unit 3 and, with this unit, are focusing on “The power of Openness.”We’ll be exploring that topic by looking at open content, open networks, and open pedagogy, and discussing how these can have an impact on student engagement.

I highly suggest you begin your journey in this unit with Creating Collaborative Communities, which contains a video discussion with Kerry Magruder on the need to designing curricula for collaboration.

Also, if you weren’t able to make it to Friday’s Twitter chat, don’t worry. We’ve captured the entire conversation here on Storify.

Sunday, July 26, 2015

We had our first #NTPoC Twitter chat this past Friday, July 25, 2015. I created this Storify using tweets tagged with #NTPoC,
so some conversations may be missing a tweet or two. Here is the Storify page. The topic: STUDENT ENGAGEMENT. Enjoy!

Use one or all of the tools we shared in "mapping Your Social Networks," to create a personal network map. When you’ve created your map, capture it as an image and share it here with the the learning community. Also, please share any observations about what your maps revealed or how they surprised you.

I am by nature a very kinetic and visual learner. You may have a sense of this already from the first two artifact challenges (the photo introductions and the web history). So, as I was chatting with Rob the other day about my connections in the online world, I of course wanted to make a visual representation of those connections to understand them better. That is, I wanted to map my online social connections.

Let’s start with the simplest tools and output using your Twitter account. These two tools are not really analyzing your social connections, but they do give you an attractive map of where your followers come from.

TweepsMap – This tool produces a free map of where your twitter followers are located around the globe. Here is my map, for example. It is kind of cool to see that I have followers in Australia and Norway – I didn’t know!!

Special NOTE: If you choose to enable any service to access your Twitter account, you can always revoke access by going to your Twitter Settings, then select Apps. You will see a list of applications that can access your twitter account., and can click to revoke access.

Mapping Your LinkedIN Network

Socilab.com – This site creates a diagram of your LinkedIn network, showing how different users are connected to each other. You can also see outliers with no connections to anyone else in your network. It also lists some measures of your network like the number of clusters you are connected to.

Here is my graph. Please note that I have removed the names to protect the innocent.

Comment

You can click on each node and it will highlight who that person is connected to. This helps you to see clusters and connections that you didn’t anticipate. It really is a lot of fun to play with. I was really surprised at how many people I have with no connections (out there on the fringes). As I look at the individuals, I can see that some of my outliers COULD be connected to other people in my network, i.e. I know that these two people work for the same organization, but for some reason they are not connected.

Mapping Your E-mail Network

Immersion from MIT Media Labs – Immersion uses the metadata from your emails (To, From, CC and time) to map the connections within your email. You can map your Gmail, MSExchange or Yahoo mail. There is also a Demo account if you don’t want to put in your own credentials.

You can move through time to see how the connectors in your email have changed over time. Immersion focuses on your inbox, so if you are very tidy, you may not see too many connections.

Here is my connected work email. I did remove names since I have some student emails. But you can see the clustered people (the green group is one specific project I am working on, so there is a lot of cc’ing on these emails). The big blue dot is my boss.

Just as Von Neumann and Conway imagined thought experiments in which a set of simple rules, combined with the appropriate elements or resources, could result in complex and amazing environments, I want us to do the same thing with education or learning).

With that in mind, our question for this discussion is simple: Given an environment (civilization) that consists of children, adults, families, communities, and government, what four simple "rules" can you imagine that would result in the highest level of learning within the environment?

In our first two units, we looked at improvisations that prompted new perspectives by imposing constraints such as time and resources. There were no wrong answers, certainly, but the design of these activities can cause a particular type of anxiety for some students.

Another type of improvisation focuses on addition or expansion as opposed to constraint. These are often collaborative and/or flexible enough to allow participants to add new rules or modify the activity on the fly.

Addition improvs can be simple and brief, or focus and deeper levels of problem solving, like complex games.

Exquisite Corpse is good example of a simple addition improv. This improv was originally designed as a surrealist parlor game, and a common version asks a group of people to construct a story by having each person contribute a sentence (or sentences) without knowing what the person before or after has written.

My wife and I used to play Exquisite Corpse with our kids while waiting for our food at restaurants. We would take a napkin, and one of us would begin by writing the first line to a story. That person would fold the napkin so the others could not see what s/he had written and then the next person would write a line. Here are two actual samples we created in one of those activities.

Round 1

Player 1: It was a typical day in New York.

Player 2: And Batman was standing vigilantly against a wax paper moon with cutout stars of fluorescent glitter.

Player 3: He, as usual, pretended he knew what was happening when, as always, he didn’t have the slightest clue.

Player 1: She thought the toilet was a swimming pool and jumped in.

Player 2: But my mother blew her nose graciously and left.

Player 3: It was soft and squishy.

Player 1: KABOOM!

Player 2: His hands motioned soundlessly in the background while he belched.

Player 3: No one ever knew for certain, but they always suspected the mailman.

Round 2

Player 2: The dog howled at the lonely moon while three men sang badly around the fire.

Player 3: She always wondered why he did that.

Player 1: Blaaaaaahhh! He puked everywhere.

Player 2: The drink went down hard but came up with ease.

Player 3: Why oh why do these things always happen to me, she thought.

Player 1: Then I saw it, the huge marshmallow.

Player 2: I’m so in love I can’t stand it.

Player 3: What not? No one will ever know.

Player 1: And then I want to bed.

If you want to play this here, simply add a comment, put the the number in the story sequence in your title, and then write out your contribution. Stacy and I have already started the activity with our two contributions.

The Game of Life

As I mentioned, other addition improvs are more serious in nature. These are designed to be cerebral activities and are generally set up like thought experiments.

We can actually find the framework of such improvs or thought experiments in early thought simulations on self-replicating machines. John Von Neumann was an early pioneer in these experiments who, realizing that such machines could not be produced with the technologies available to him in the 1950s, turned to the computer pattern games created by the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam.

Ulam suggested that Von Neumann construct an abstract universe for his analysis of machine reproduction. It would be an imaginary world with self-consistent rules, as in Ulam’s computer games. It would be a world complex enough to embrace all the essentials of machine operation but otherwise as as simple as possible. The rules governing the world would be a simplified physics. A proof of machine reproduction ought to be easier to devise in such an imaginary world, as all the nonessential points of engineering would be stripped away.

With this inspiration, Von Neumann devised a thought experiment to show that it was indeed possible to provide machines with the necessary resources and sets instructions that would allow them to create copies of themselves or, new machines that were of equal or greater complexity. His experiment consisted of an infinite checkerboard as his universe. Each square on the checkerboard could be any of a number of states corresponding roughly to machine components. A "machine" in this model was a pattern of such cells.

As Poundstone points out, "Von Neumann’s cellular space can be thought of as an exotic, solitaire form of chess.The board is limitless, and each square can be empty or contain one of the 28 types of game pieces. The lone player arranges the game pieces in an initial pattern. From there on, strict rules determine all successive configurations of the board."

In other words, Von Neumann came up with an "open" model that allowed a "player" to establish the initial state or setup of the game pieces, and then watch to see if that setup would produce a self-replicating machine. What he discovered through this experiment was that yes, there are initial settings that can allow a machine to self-replicate. His experiment also provided a framework for modeling how a simple set of recursive rules can produce complex interactions and complexity in different environments.

The British mathematician John Conway revisited Von Neumann’s work in 1970, when he published his seminal Game of Life in Scientific American in 1970. Like Von Neumann’s experiment, Conway’s game was a zero-player game, meaning the evolution and result of the game is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input by the player.

Conway’s game was less complicated than Von Neumann’s, however, and it was more applicable. It was simple enough to be programmed into computers of the day and thus provide a simulated proof. Thankfully, Game of Life has retained its appeal and significance over the decades, and as a result there are a number of excellent online versions that allows us to play with the phenomenon of emergent systems first-hand (such as this javascript version).

Like von Neumann, Conway designed his game to be played on an infinite two-dimensional grid of square cells. Rather than having game pieces to place on the cells however, Game of Life allows us to set initial patterns simply by marking cells with one of two possible states, either "alive" or "dead." Once the game begins, at each step in time every cell interacts with its eight neighboring cells. Through these interactions, we can witness the following transitions:

Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies, as if caused by under-population.

Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation.

Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies, as if by overcrowding.

Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

As we play Conway’s game, we are indeed struck by the complexity that can be produced from simple, recursive rules. We see new patterns and behaviors develop. We find that patterns can actually recreate themselves along with their initial instruction set (just as von Neumann imagined). In fact, if we did not know how simple the game rules and components really were, we would swear that some of the resulting behaviors could not possibly be produced by anything so primitive.

Von Neumann’s self-replicating machines experiment, as well as Conway’s Game of Life, point to all kinds of fun addition and/or design improvs that we might practice across the curriculum. These improvs generally begin with a desired outcome or hypothesis, and then ask participants to come up with the simplest design or set of rules/components to achieve the outcome.

These improvs tend to be more advanced and require more thought. We’re going to try one out ourselves this week, in our discussion titled The Game of Education.

With regards to student engagement and helping learners create meaningful connections across their own and other networks, a key consideration is how we can design the learning experience to embrace open learning and collaboration.

In our conversation below, Stacy addresses this topic, as well as some of the important aspects of an open pedagogy, one that gives the student more ownership of the learning experience and its outcomes.

Some of Stacy’s comments are also captured in a list of eight qualities of open pedagogy that she, Laura Gibbs, and I discussed earlier this year. That discussion was actually a preamble to a#OpenTeachingOU Twitter chat on open content.

Let’s take a look at that Twitter dialogue as a way to look at the ideas and observations of other instructors and thought leaders (scroll down to question 2).

Kerry Magruder is Curator of the History of Science Collections at the University of Oklahoma, as well as Associate Professor of History of Science. More to the point, he’s an amazing person, a real academic rock star, and has one of the coolest jobs I can imagine.

He gets to play with really old manuscripts!

Kerry began his career as a science instructor, but eventually gravitated to History of Science as a way to address the fact that, too often, he saw science being taught without any connection to its discovery and practice, or without reference to the larger scientific community. As he says in our interview:

Manuscripts are windows into the past, the stories of these creative people with great determination and often times quite limited resources accomplishing amazing things.

If people think science is cold and impersonal, we need to awaken an interest, awaken an imagination so that they can see a creative and personal side that comes out from all these stories.

One way to define Kerry’s work is as that of a custodian of connections – someone who expands the context of learning by connecting past and present. In his own words, he’s about "connecting the viewer back to the content and the concepts," and about "recovering the lost connections that can bring out the real meaning and personal relevance of science."

Kerry is also a big fan of openness and sees it as a key component in both scientific advancement and in the way universities design learning. I think his observations in the interview below provide a nice framework for our discussions on openness as an important part of student engagement.

My conversation with Kerry raises a number of questions about student engagement.

How do we facilitate more "openness" across the curriculum? This seems particularly important in lower-level courses where we have groups of students with such diverse discipline interests. Can we engage them more deeply by helping them find connections to their personal learning interests?

How can we model Kerry’s "communities of collaboration" in our own course designs? What kind of problems or activities lend themselves best to bringing together diverse groups to solve them?

How can we use technology to reinforce or facilitate collaborative problem-solving? What technologies do you find most useful for collaborating to solve problems with a group or team?

[This is a guest post by my friend, Dr. Tom Hsu, Co-founder of Ergopedia. You can read more about Tom at the end of this post.]

A typical science book is close to 1,000 pages. Intimidating. Dense. Very few students are able learn all the material in a typical science curricula in one year. This is especially true considering we actually have only 36 weeks, and would still be true if we had twice that much time. That doesn’t mean we couldn’t teach it. Teachers are pretty good at working under impossible conditions; we can teach anything. The students just wouldn’t be able to learn it all. Which brings me to my title; if the goal is to engage students in learning, and have them learn, then what science should we teach? Within that 1,000-page body of scientific knowledge and skills, what is most appropriate for our students? What is learnable, teachable, important, and relevant? Out of the teachable and learnable subset, what fits into our standards and assessments?

You love science! I love science. We each find our specific area of science fascinating, and long ago learned its language and customs. To help our students learn we all need to take the difficult but necessary step of moving to the other side of the desk. We must stand in the shoes of someone who does not speak our language, does not know the meaning of endoplasmic reticulum or molarity or periodic force. Someone who does not care at all that the quadratic formula is beautiful. Then we need to go outside the school system altogether. What knowledge and skills will help our students succeed in fields other than research science? Many fewer than 1% of students ever become research scientists. Should our curriculum be driven, as it is, by the purpose of preparing research scientists?

I became successful because of public schools. I can still remember exactly when I decided I liked science. In the sixth grade my teacher did a science lesson on paper airplanes. She brought in a student from a local college to help and he showed me different ways to make a paper airplane fly. Then they both helped me learn to make it fly even farther. I was hooked; I wanted to build airplanes and eventually went to college to study aerospace engineering. I was hooked because:

The curriculum was made meaningful to me.

I had a positive, successful (carefully structured) hands-on experience

I got to do the real stuff, building an airplane, without lots of theory. Later, I wanted to learn the theory!

At Eastman Kodak, where I once worked in engineering, we had an informal prize whenever one of us needed to use calculus in our jobs. We awarded it only once during the several years I was there. I challenge you to think about each topic in your curriculum as it applies to success in real life, outside of science. You will find that many ideas in “standard” curriculum are not useful! Maybe they were once useful, but no longer. Maybe they are useful to research scientists, but so what! We spend inordinate amounts of our precious class time teaching many concepts that are important to no one but specialists in our discipline. They are not bad concepts to teach. But what are we neglecting in their stead?

I believe the mission of k-12 science education is to give all graduates of high school useful scientific and technical knowledge and skills. By “useful”, I mean the things they can use in their lives, outside of laboratories and outside of science education. Leave the universities to train the research scientists. We need to prepare everyone else; the business people, the contractors, and most important the future parents, to understand how our technical world operates. People have a tendency to fear and mistrust what they don’t understand. America became great on the basis of our technical and scientific prowess. We need to keep that torch burning by making sure all Americans are able solve problems and make informed technical decisions based on sound scientific knowledge and reasoning.

Observation: Students are engaged when they are successful at learning. Therefore, curriculum should provide learnable, understandable content that is grade-appropriate.

The first high school science course many students take is biology. Open a typical high school biology book and look at the first few chapters. You will find protein synthesis, respiration reactions, DNA, enzymes, catalysts, hydrogen bonding, and a laundry list of fairly advanced chemistry topics! I have found the Kreb's Cycle, a graduate level topic not so long ago, in an introductory high school biology book in the introductory chapters. Is this how to engage students in science? By bombarding them with 2,000 new vocabulary words and concepts they are unprepared to understand? In fact, the traditional high school biology course with its overemphasis on vocabulary and memorization disengages students from science.

There is a strong movement to put physics first in the high school curriculum followed by chemistry, then biology. Being a physicist, naturally I think of physics as the most important science, right? Wrong. The drastic changes in human society that came with the agricultural revolution (2,000 years) the industrial revolution (300 years) and the information revolution (40 years) will pale before the changes that will come as we explore our ability to change our very species itself and the detailed workings of our planet. If the wrong microbe were to get loose homo sapiens could become extinct far faster than the dinosaurs.

I agree with the physics first initiative because physics is the easiest way to engage students in learning systems thinking and quantitative reasoning. Traditional biology with its overemphasis on memorization and vocabulary fails to adequately prepare students to understand their role in the larger ecosystem of Earth or even the functions of their own bodies. To understand modern biology you really need a foundation of chemistry. And to understand why chemistry occurs you need to understand energy, atoms, and systems. That is why physics should be first: because it is the most direct way to teach the big ideas of energy, atoms, causality, and systems. Physics provides the foundation for chemistry, which is the foundation for biology.

Few students think physics is engaging because they don't like math. It has nothing to do with physics and virtually everything to do with how math is taught. Throwing the traditional wall of "physics" math at eighth and ninth graders will NOT get us where we need to be! Physics First needs to be a different physics than was Physics Last (or no physics). A ninth grade physics course must develop the big ideas of systems, energy, and atoms conceptually and mathematically, with the concept preceding the math and not vice versa. Energy conservation is such an important idea that it should not wait until mid-year. Many traditionally important results, such as free fall, and mechanical advantage can be developed using energy arguments far easier than with traditional vector algebra. We need to rethink how we teach physics as well as what we teach to develop a sound foundation of both understanding and quantitative thinking.

Observation: Questions are more interesting and engaging than facts.

I am a strong believer in guided inquiry. In guided inquiry a group of students is presented with a phenomena, offered some pertinent questions and a suggested path of inquiry that might lead to an explanation. We developed some very special experiments that create situations that are easy to describe and reproduce, yet deep in understanding. For example, imagine a track that starts with a downhill slope followed by a level section about as long as the slope. A little car starts from the top of the hill, rolls down the hill, along the flat, and then bounces off a rubber band at the bottom. After bouncing, the car then rolls backward and partially up the hill again. Students notice that the car never rolls back as high as it started. Why? What is the explanation for why the car never goes higher than it started? Energy of height (potential energy) is proportional to height. Energy of speed (kinetic energy) is proportional to speed. The car never rolls back higher than it started because that would require more energy than is available.

Once students see the big idea that the car needs more energy to get higher, we pose the next question: is there any way the car can be made to go higher than it starts? If so, how, and why? Once they are thinking in terms of limited energy, students quickly realize that they need to give the car more energy. For example, a small push downwards at the start gives the car additional energy. Pushing adds energy and the car can now roll higher than it started. By using a real car and track, students learn almost immediately about efficiency. Friction diverts some energy and it takes a substantial push just to get the car back to its initial height.

Curriculum and equipment must work together. You wouldn’t want your surgeon operating with a kitchen paring knife would you? A scalpel is specifically designed for surgery and the equipment for learning science should be created specifically to learn and not merely to demonstrate! Just as a scalpel is more than “a sharp knife” the effectiveness of a real car and track as a learning tool is based on designing the actual car and track to have just the right kind of friction, the right sorts of angles, the right kind of wheels and bearings, a technique for applying a controlled force, a way to measure level, and countless other details. You just can’t get this kind of deep learning to happen with sticks and strings. Actually you could, but few of us have Galileo’s talent, patience, or time!

Choosing what to teach

I believe we cannot teach all of the content in most science standards in a way that most of our students will learn it and retain it. That means we must choose which content to teach and which to ignore. We favor the use of some very practical questions when choosing what to emphasize in a curriculum.

Question #1: Is there a useful application of this concept, outside of academic science, that students can understand at the level they are at? If there is no such an application, or the application is incomprehensibly advanced, you should think very hard about teaching a different concept instead. There is plenty in the curriculum to choose from!

Electricity provides a good example of how to apply question #1. To most of the world, the important aspects of electricity are voltage and current. Voltage and current are the things we use every day when we plug in appliances or turn on a light. Current is what flows and does work. Voltage measures the available power that is carried by a quantity of flowing current, such as one amp. One amp of current from a 120 volt wall outlet carries 120 watts of power to do useful things. 120 watts can propel a bicycle and rider up a moderate hill. The same one amp of current flowing out of a 1.5 volt battery carries only 1.5 watts of power. 1.5 watts is barely enough power to light a night light; not nearly enough to ride up a hill. The amoount of current is the same. The voltage tells you how much power each amp carries. Voltage and current are real, measurable, every-day concepts students can measure and use. We build circuits, make light bulbs glow and only then, once the student has some successful experience and, only then do we ask what is really going on inside those wires. Then is the time to learn the more abstract concepts of electric forces and fields. We call this the STEM approach. We use practical applications of engineering and technology (amps and volts) to teach the science of physics (electricity and magnetism).

Consider the fact that virtually every traditional physics course begins the same topic of electricity with electric charges, the electric field, and Coulomb’s inverse square law of the force between two electric charges. Almost no one outside physics uses Coulomb’s law or cares that electrons really move from negative to positive. In many books the short (and inadequate) section on voltage and current is at the very end of the unit. Many (if not most) physics teachers never get to the end of the unit and therefore the majority of students never learn the practical application of electricity. Why do physics courses start with the abstractions of charges and electric fields? We call this the "anti-STEM" approach! The anti-STEM approach is to subtract all practical engineering and technology from the teaching of "pure science.

Question #2: Does the concept help build understanding of the big picture or is it a small detail?

I have seen a k-12 science curriculum that teaches density for two weeks, every year, in every grade, from grade 4 to grade 9. In the grand scheme of things density is a tiny detail. Its emphasis in the curriculum is far in excess of its importance. Physics is no better at prioritizing content. Fully one quarter of a traditional physics book is devoted to building up the equations of accelerated motion. There are subscripts, superscripts and symbols; there are diagrams and frictionless examples; and there are difficult-to-parse word problems that carefully construct situations of constant acceleration. Do you know that in the real world there are virtually no situations of constant acceleration! Students must survive a half-dozen chapters before they get to the really important and useful ideas of energy and systems.

Question #3: Is the concept important today, or is it only historically important?

Unless the historical development is really important to understanding what is useful today, we skipped it. We want students to learn science that they can use today, not science that was interesting 100 years ago. History is important, but not as important as having a scientifically literate population who can evaluate scientific issues rationally.

Question #4: How can you teach this concept while introducing the fewest number of new words or equations required for the student to learn and apply the concept?

This is hard for us since we know the language and customs of our scientific disciplines. Try marking out every word not in common use and see if you can still teach the big idea. The average educated person’s vocabulary is around 20,000 words. The average 9th grade biology book has more than 2,000 new words; words that a student must decipher to be able to understand the important ideas in the book; words that will never be used again outside the narrow world of research biology and medicine. Can we teach the ideas without this incredible barrier of words? For example, I have seen the term “endoplasmic reticulum” on an 8th grade state assessment. Why is this term there? In my humble opinion you can teach the important ideas in biology, such as ecosystems, food chains, anatomy and physiology, heredity, evolution, and the organization of life on Earth, without 90% of the big words. Wouldn’t you rather have students understand the important ideas instead of the specialized vocabulary?

Question #5: Is there a way for students to get hands-on experience with this concept?

Teaching the mathematical representation of electric fields (Coulomb's law) to ninth grade students is almost a waste of time. Students have neither the mathematical skills, nor the experiential background to understand and use the concepts. Unless you are willing to invest the time in providing experiences to give kids a handle on the abstractions, don't hold students responsible for learning material that can only be understood using mathematics above your students heads. That doesn't mean your shouldn't talk about cool things like time travel or quarks! It just means that "engagement topics" such as relativity should not be on the test, and students should know that they are not responsible for understanding time travel.

Using technology

Technology is a great way to introduce concepts in science and make them engaging by being relevant. For example, instead of starting a sound unit with the theory of waves, why not start by asking how a CD works? 100 years ago you could only hear music if you were next to a musician! Very few people heard enough musicians to even have a favorite band. The recording of sound was tremendously important to the development of culture, and engages kids. Exactly how do you capture a sound and record it so it can be played back? You probably can’t find a kid today who does not know what an MP3 file is. Do you know what an MP3 file is? How is it different from the sound recorded on a CD? The technique of starting with technology is interesting and engaging to students, I have done it many times. The other way (theory first) is boring to most students; I have done that too!

About the author

I should warn the reader that while I am expressing one personal opinion many of these ideas have come from other teachers across America. It has been my pleasure to have taught, and worked with, more than 18,000 teachers over the past 25 years, both in workshops across the country and in courses I have taught. Over time, I developed some of these rules from my own classroom teaching, in urban and suburban schools, public and private, with students ranging from fourth grade through graduate school.

Some of my critique of "pure science" comes from a background of practical engineering. Even in my "research" career I liked to build things, first at the superconducting accelerator at Stony Brook, and later on the Alcator tokamak fusion experiment at MIT. My work in industry including developing the first color copiers (Xerox, Dupont), manufacturing photographic paper and film (Kodak), manufacturing science equipment and publishing books (first with CPO Science and now with Ergopedia).

At heart, I am a teacher. When people ask me what I do, I proudly inform them that I am a science teacher. When asked how I got that way, I said that my own teachers made a huge difference in my life. My father was a cook and my mother was a waitress. I grew up in public schools, and along the way have been a carpenter, a cook, an engineer, a bicycle mechanic, a nanny, and even a musician (although, to be honest, I never actually earned any money as a musician). Every one of these experiences has enriched my ability as a teacher.

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

I'm on my way home this morning from my quick trip
to Boston, but I wanted to take a moment to encourage everyone to take a look at this week's improv challenge (along with my attempt posted in the comments). I realized, after I finished, that I would likely have benefited from some math symbols or elements. However, from a poet's perspective, I think this works okay for my planet's civilization.

Also, I've posted a my initial thoughts on the Extending the Improvisation exercise, so please fell free to beginning tojump in with your thoughts as well! And speaking of thoughts and discussions, if you hadn't seen these already, please check out the conversation on Stacy's post on student blogging.

Finally, I hope you'll be able to join us for our Twitter chat Friday at 10:00 CDT. Stacy, Laura, and I will be there, and look forward to hearing everyone's ideas on student engagement. As a reminder, here are some of the questions we'll be throwing out. That said, we'll gladly jump off in any direction that interests the group.

Q1 - What does good student engagement look like to you?

Q2 - Who or what should students be engaging with? The Instructor, each other, the content?

Q3 - What is the role of a teacher or facilitator in promoting student engagement?

Q4 - What are examples from your own learning experience that point to the power of connections?

Q5 - How is self-reflection part of engagement? How do we encourage learners all ages to be more self-reflective?

Q6 - How can we encourage students to engage after the course is over?

Monday, July 20, 2015

Welcome to Unit 2, everyone! Our theme this week is “The Power of Connections,” and we’re going to be exploring the importance of both self-reflection and collaboration when it comes to student engagement.

A great way to start the week is to read the dialogue and watch the inspiring videos of Emilee Little and Chris Brewster in the first item in the unit: “Student Engagement and the Power of Connections.” And by the way, if you want to hear more about/from Emilee and Chris, you can watch their full interview videos by following these links:

Also, while we’re on the subject of engaging through connections, I thought I would throw out this fun item my wife and I created yesterday (in our copious spare time).

This is a sendup of all the edtech news roundups I’ve created over the years, as well as a good example of an “open” or “addition” improv (I’ll be talking about those next week). I designed it to appeal to a number of the different communities I belong to -- personal and professional -- and can use it to network between them. Besides, what’s not to like about something that bridges The Grateful Dead and Les Paul and Mary Ford?

As always, please comment on the items you read or watch and use our hashtag -- #NTPoC!

Rob: It seems that great minds really do think alike. So, do you want to provide a brief introduction?

Stacy: Absolutely. Emilee is the passionate educator who founded New Land Academy in Oklahoma City to serve the refugee community.

Rob: You know, until I met Emilee, I didn’t know there was a refugee community in Oklahoma City.

Stacy: They are a portion of those fortunate families whose requests for permanent settlement are granted each year (approximately 1% of the 50 million refugees worldwide are accepted for resettlement).

Rob: Right. And the young learners at New Land come from countries such as Burma, Eritrea, Afghanistan, and Iraq. These are young men and women who’ve lost their sense of connection, who aren’t sure who they are, why they exist, or where they’re going.

Stacy: And I know that New Land has developed an incredible approach to curriculum as a way to help these kids recover their sense of identity and worth.

Rob: It’s inspiring. So inspiring, in fact that we should probably let Emilee tell us about it.

Stacy: Agreed.

Rob: I really love hearing about the Rhythms they design around at New Land (see Figure 1.1).

Stacy: Yes, their work points to the importance of that first connection – the connection with self (Bestowing Identity).

Rob: What they’re doing with regards to self-reflection and helping students reach out from that identity is amazing. A great lesson for all of us.

Stacy: That’s the charter school in South Oklahoma City that’s transforming their community and the lives of their students.

Rob: Indeed. Chris is a real visionary and the work going on at Santa Fe South is incredible. In this interview, we’re going to hear describe how the team at Santa Fe South Schools are redefining both student and community success by fostering connections and making everyone responsible for learner outcomes.

Stacy: Wow, he brings up some really tough issues, like who is responsible for maintaining learner connections and building community.

Rob: I love his statement about being relentless in not letting kids disconnect.

Stacy: And valuing community outside the classroom.

Rob: That’s a big theme in both of these videos – the extension of the learning community way beyond the class cohort.

Stacy: Okay, here’s a question for you.

Rob: Yes?

Stacy: Both Emilee and Chris work in K-12. Does the same commitment or responsibility apply in Higher Education?

Rob: And if so, who’s responsible for creating and maintaining connections these communities?